Ogilvy foursome launches new agency Common Ventures

Four senior staff from Ogilvy Sydney have set up new company Common Ventures and have signed their former employer as their first major client.

Creative team Jane Burhop and James Crawley, along with innovations director, Brian Merrifield and head of digital strategy, Damian Damjanovski will be white-labelling their services on a retainer basis to their former employer when Common Ventures formally launches in September.

The agency is built on a new model, described as part technology incubator, and part advertising agency.

Their intention is to spend 60% of their time working on client projects and responding to briefs, and the remaining 40% developing proactive ideas and making them, then selling them in to clients if the idea fits the brand.

ADVERTISEMENT

Damjanov told Mumbrella: “Agency people are in awesome spaces full of great ideas, but those ideas are seldom actualised because they’re not right for a client or it’s not the right time. Instead of answering a brief, we want to be problem solvers for hire,”

“Our clients are used to the way we work, with creative and strategy working simultaneously, which means we can offer an amazingly fast turnaround, more cohesive, better results, and clients can see why you’re proposing a particular idea. We take our client’s businesses seriously, but we don’t take ourselves too seriously: we just wanted to make something fun.”

The four partners will continue to work on their existing clients as usual until September, when their services will be available through Ogilvy or available for new client work directly. The group will be based out of Ogilvy’s St Leonard’s headquarters while working on Ogilvy client projects.

The four worked on recent Coke campaigns well as Nestle, AMEX and other Ogilvy clients.